Story time:
A friend of a friend brakes the glass panel on a his Fractal case.
The friend sends an email to Fractal Support with tye intention of trying to buy the glass panel, if it is still available for that particular case. He is being asked about the details of the case.
The next day the panel was mounted on the case… Based Fractal sent the panel … From Scandinavia to Southern Europe … Quite possibly air freight… For free… For free!
So i bought my case in ~2010 - a Define XL. it came with USB2 ports and they sold usb3 as an option. FFW ~5 years and I now have a use for it. managed to find it for like 100€ online - wtf? Email Fractal and get a response ”oh i have like 5 of those in my office! give me your address and i’ll mail you one”
My 15 year old case has USB 3 ports in the front :-)
LMAO no it isn’t! Not answering calls, acting dumb when you do, trying to bully the noisy customer away and charging extra for everything even when not allowed by EU law is customer service here.
If I need customer service, I avoid Western products/services and go for Japanese, South Korean or HK ones; they actually respond fast and take you serious, without extra charge.
Wrong sub, I know.
Nah, definitely goes above and beyond. There are some companies that do this, but there are plenty that will do anything they can to make you just go away.
I’ve heard a similar story of BeQuiet. Friend bought a cooler for AM3, upgraded to AM4, asked about new bracket, it was shipped out to them for free. But I think in that case it was actual company policy they announced on their website, as did many other cooler manufacturers when AM4 came out.
Pretty much every company and every shop I’ve used in my 40+ years on this planet went above and beyond. Both big corporations like IKEA and Philips to small local online shops, which are trying to survive in a world dominated by Amazon. I also lived in a few European countries and had the same experience everywhere.
Didn’t know my favorite case supplier was European! Could have guessed by the design language and the Fractal “North” lol.
Fractal North is dope! And my cat loves the box it came in, still plays with it one year later.
Is it a strange type of box or is your cat just especially fond of it? My cat’s partial to a bog standard haribo box, but that’s just because it’s her haribo box.
Well, it’s kind of a standard cardboard box, but with a few interesting features.
First of all, it’s quite big for a cat, so she can sit and stand inside, but it’s not too big to take a lot of space in my flat.
It is also very sturdy. A lot of cardboard boxes these days are very flimsy. The Fractal box is not flimsy at all and can take a beating from a cat.
It also has handle slots and cats love small holes to put their paws into.
Finally, it came with big foamed rubbery plastic inserts instead of regular styrofoam. Which are incredibly sturdy, impossible to break for a cat and they have big holes, so they serve as reconfigurable maze walls.
BeQuiet, Phanteks, and Noctua are also European btw!
BeQuiet is based in Glinde, Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, Phanteks is from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Noctua is based in Vienna, Austria.
I bought a BeQuiet case last year to replace a cheap Chinese hotbox, and it’s great. Cool, quiet, roomy, good material quality, and not that much more expensive than the case it replaced.
Can’t encourages you enough to buy this brand. Real good products, well done and the attention of details make your case build so nice and easy. You can see they know how to build a computer. Lot of possible variations.
I’m am customer of Fractal Deign since several decades now, bough 6 or 7 cases and never had issues, very good quality product. These cases leave my house only because i donated them to my family.
I’ve always been buying Fractal. Didn’t even know they’re European. That’s awesome.
